Yesterday marked the culmination of an intense few weeks for CBoxx with the launch of the AIFA FFWD Business Transition Service at Somerset House with a host of financial services dignitaries, some tasty canapes, a great view of London, 4 very shiny Macs and a podium. If you’re lucky enough to be an AIFA Member then you can login and use it all for free! Sitting at the heart of this very comprehensive service (see Module 06) is an AIFA branded version of the CBoxx Business Modeller.

Video introducing the AIFA FFWD RDR Business Transition Academy. The CBoxx screens are about half way through (1 min 15s into it).

For us the opportunity came out of the blue when we were contacted by NMG Consulting (who are project managing the service) to visit them and demonstrate our wares. All went well but it took a little while for us to get the green light while NMG surveyed the market to ensure they’d made the best decision, by which time we had about three weeks left to deliver what would more comfortably be a six week project.

With a firm hand on the scope we worked hard and delivered the goods bang on time. The Fee Calculations were updated, enabling us to model the most common RDR compliant Adviser Charge structures and then we worked closely with NMG, Adventis NMG and AIFA themselves to deliver a branded interface that looks great (in my modest opinion) and makes the job for the IFA about as easy and intuitive as it can be given the complexity of the task – three steps to model and transition your business.

The golden idea really came from Andy Smith one very early morning at Gatwick Airport as we sat waiting for the Edinburgh plane to visit Origo. With just three simple sliders, no keyboard necessary, the IFA is able to define and visually refine their client segments in seconds before moving onto the fun part, the What-If Analysis where they can play around and determine the best Service Proposition for both their clients and their business once the RDR lands.

We can’t claim a lot of credit for the rest of the AIFA FFWD Service which really does look like a remarkable and very valuable resource when viewed as a whole. We’d strongly urge any IFA out there who needs to get RDR-ready to take a very close look at it. And this is only the start, we’ve got a few more tricks up our sleeve for this service as it continues to mature.